Peter Loftus

Well, what changed was a lot of investment by the Chinese government as well as

private investors in China to really make a priority of building up this biotech, biopharma ecosystem that placed a lot more emphasis on more cutting-edge research so that they could produce these companies, these startups that were coming up with new drugs for different diseases that were really innovative and much more so than had been the case in the

innovation spectrum.

Drugs have become a lot more complex over the last 20 years or so.

And so you have much more innovative ways of trying to combat disease using drugs like biologics, which are basically like drugs that are made in living cells and have proteins and are really much more targeted to a disease than the way drugs were made in the past.

That's the kind of thing that China is doing more of.

And so one example is

Thank you so much for having me.

Basically, by using this sort of dual approach, researchers think that they can deliver chemotherapy-type drugs to cancer patients, but in a more targeted way, so that it gets more at the tumor, causing less collateral damage like we've all heard about with chemo.

Well, it has a few implications.

If you're a big company, like the names that we've heard of, like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, you know, the way those companies have operated for a number of years now is that they have their own in-house research labs and they spend a lot of money and do a lot of science trying to find new drugs for diseases that have been tough to treat with drugs in the past.

But they've all shifted to kind of also look beyond their own labs.

Because in the last 20 or more years, there have been a lot of biotech companies, small companies, which have primarily been in the U.S.

that are really doing cutting edge drug research.

And what often happens is a small company will do really good work and come up with a really good drug.

But it's a small company, and so it doesn't have the capacity to really do the big trials or get that drug commercialized.

And so they either get sold to a big pharma company or they license the rights.

And then that drug basically becomes the next big product for a company like Eli Lilly or Merck or Pfizer.

So for many years, the main base of operations for those biotech companies that were selling

funneling their pipeline to big pharma was in the US.